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EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift

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Re: EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift

#4
two words: PayPal lol

Ebay was so awesome when it was the wild wild west and you had to actually email back and forth with buyers and sellers to establish a repoire before you trusted them. It baffles me that a smaller auction company has never really risen from Ebay's apparent ashes. I really had my money on Gbay for a while...

Between Ebay, Craigslist and Amazon (who charges say a 15% fee to sell video games), I'll get the most money in my pocket selling on Amazon and that is bullshit.

Re: EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift

#5
post #2

its all about $$$. eBay used to save you a crapload over other web stores. Now the difference is so tiny, that there is no reason to take the risk with eBay

I assume you mean the risk of using PayPal. That's the main reason I don't use eBay.

risk of using paypal, risk of getting scammed(never getting an item, getting a box full of rocks, getting a refurbished item as new, getting a knockoff etc)

Re: EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift

#6
post #2

its all about $$$. eBay used to save you a crapload over other web stores. Now the difference is so tiny, that there is no reason to take the risk with eBay

I assume you mean the risk of using PayPal. That's the main reason I don't use eBay.

Not to me - PayPal doesn't enter into why I don't go to ebay. It's like vaksel said: I used to be able to actually save money by buying things on ebay. Now I often find that ebay's sellers are so unrealistic that they have higher prices than even B&M stores. Also, from a seller's perspective, the fees that ebay charges today are so much more expensive that it makes it far less attractive for me to put my goods on ebay in the first place.

Re: EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift

#7
I was at a party a couple of weeks ago, and the subject of eBay came up. The people there were all 30-something professionals, and none had ever bought or sold anything on eBay! Few even bought stuff online. These people are my friends, and I had just presumed that their buying habits were like mine. As I stood in front of them with my mouth open, they asked, "What kind of stuff do you buy on eBay?" in a gee-wiz sort of way.

We at HN are not at all representative of Americans. Everyone in that room had at least one college degree, and the average earnings were probably $100K. Even then, they weren't buying online.

Re: EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift

#8
post #2

its all about $$$. eBay used to save you a crapload over other web stores. Now the difference is so tiny, that there is no reason to take the risk with eBay

On the contrary, I think it's all about eBay has long been a market for new goods, instead of the used stuff that the original idea was based off of. Auctions just aren't a very good means to sell new goods.

Go search for any product you like on eBay - the overwhelming majority of the results are new items, from large-scale eBay dealers, using the Buy-it-now feature instead of real auctioning.

In this case eBay has simply become another webstore - and Amazon has had third-party sellers for quite some time also. As a webstore, Amazon's brand name is considerably more powerful than eBay. Not to mention Amazon takes payment on your behalf as a trusted entity - which is more than can be said for the money order and PayPal-based payment system of eBay.

Oh, also, so many eBay listings lowball the selling price and then destroy you on shipping. This is the primary reason why I stopped using the service - it was too much work having to figure out exactly how much it would cost to get it shipped to me. Amazon third-party sellers are locked to certain shipping rates.

Re: EBay Losing Traffic To Amazon After Strategy Shift

#9
eBay's mantra should be, "make it easy to buy, sell, and trade shit". Unfortunately they lost sight of that a long time ago when they were trying to hard to woo bigger sellers with "Buy it Now" and all the other professional features they built into eBay. Their vision was too vague and looked more like, "build a big, online marketplace". Unfortunately for eBay, Amazon started with this vision and executed it much better.

I don't use eBay anymore because its hard to list an item and deal with all the emails about it. Instead, I buy stuff on Amazon much easier at about the same price without all the aggravation of bidding. If I want to sell something, like a book, I can list it on Amazon and sell it without answering a billion emails and typing up a big description.

Amazon is kicking eBay's ass.

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